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not the aristocracy of ancient families; it was instead an apocalyptic "aristocracy of the Stock Exchange and newwealth" standing alongside that of Pitt's peerage.33 He therefore believed it imperative to furnish "the utmost preciseness and clearness in the analysis and constituents of genius" in order to distinguish the real thing from this impostor. And he spent years in pursuit of that analysis even as he tracked the minutiae of his Merovingian bloodline. Genius, like nobility, turned out to rest on an analysis of what he called "the Value of Historic Pedigrees." His contention was that "genius or moral virtue," while not exactly inherited in a deterministic sense, tended in general to follow bloodlines. A knowledge of authorial heredity might not be essential to judge the worth of a poet's work, but "if we are interested in his genius," Brydges remarked, "we always desire to know his history."A descent like his -which purportedly included Lord Chancellor Egerton, Princess Mary Tudor, William Cavendish, "the whole race of Plantagenets," the Tudors, Charlemagne, the kings of Jerusalem, Sir George Ent, all the lords Chandos, Gibbon, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, and many others -gave him a better chance than most ofmanifestinggenius.34 His own love ofliterature, he conceded, was not solely a product of this "hereditary infusion." But it had sprung from "the intrinsic qualities and colours of my mind and temper."

One aspect of this that deserves note is that genius was not always marked by originality In general, Brydges thought that new opinions were ipso facto unlikely to be true or (therefore) good. A true genius might be someone who restated truths already known, perhaps since ancient times.The significant thingwas how theywere restated. True authorship was a kind of spontaneous re-creation, possible only from a mind created genealogically. This drove Brydges to formulate a discipline dedicated to examining how "the rank, habits, and character of his ancestors" conditioned a genius. He called this "imaginative biography." It amounted to an attempt-by his standards a systematic one-to capture the characteristics and sources of genius by exploring the inner lives of authors in genealogical terms.35

What imaginative biography revealed was that genius was utterly incompatible with the world of print in late Georgian Britain. The printing press was the very icon of enlightenment, and the image of a free press was central to Britain's national pride. But Brydges maintained that works of genius were unlikely to be favored by a publishing industry shaped by copyright, and hence devoted to satisfying popular tastes. Authorship had become a matter of prostitution, "a mere piece of dull mechanism" serving party interests or motivated by demand to sell "vulgar stories suited to feeble intellects." "The most profitable parts of authorship are the mechanical and the servile," he declaimed; "to make large profits, therefore, is certainly no proof of genius or of talent!" And the rise of steamprinted periodicals with anonymous reviews accentuated this. An author had no chance against such a creature: "it is mechanically dispersed every where, and read by every one, -read, as newspapers are read, - to qualify a man to join in the conversation of society: its circulation is multiplied at least thirty-fold beyond the average sale of separate publications; -and a single copy on the table of a large reading-room affords perusal to hundreds." Contemporary publishing practices had thus become amatter of "intrigue, faction, and combination"-practices utterly incompatible with genius. Merely the need to live in London in order to engage with these mechanisms was destructive enough, ruining the very solitude and seclusion that genius required.

Seclusion was a paramount principle here. It pervaded Brydges's discussions of politics, creativity, and reception alike, defining his representations of nobility, virtue, authorship, and reading. He was convinced, for example, that readers unable to enjoy tranquility would be unable to exercise freedom